B.j. Vogt’s "We Don’t Even Know if That’s Going to be the When" forms the boundaries of this exhibit, shown with "Any City" by Ruben Ochoa. Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Ruben Ochoa and Daniel McGrath are drilling holes into the floor. The sound is amplified in this raw, mostly concrete space, and they’re wearing not earplugs, but those big, chunky hearing protectors most often seen at shooting ranges. This is all to anchor the rebar leg of Ochoa’s sculpture, which they then mallet into place with a pang, pang, pang. The piece nearly touches the ceiling, and red scaffolding holds it in place till it literally finds its legs. Cement dust drifts through the air; several squiggly lengths of rebar—said legs—lie on the floor, uncrated and ready to be attached to a body of wooden shipping pallets. These otherworldly forms (the press release for the show likens them to H.G. Wells’ Martian tripods in War of the Worlds, though they also resemble giant, industrial daddy longlegs) make up half of the first show at Duet, McGrath’s new Grand Center gallery. Along with assistant director Rocky Pardo, McGrath plans to curate exhibits that pair local and out-of-town artists and offer “both a both a comparison and contrast of the cultural landscape that influences each of the artists’ work.”
A young Los Angeles sculptor who’s shown all over the world, including at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Ochoa has never exhibited here. “I’ve driven though St. Louis,” he quips. “And I think I once ate at a White Castle.” (When the pair takes a lunch break, Ochoa has the chance to be initiated into another St. Louis culinary cult: Imo’s Pizza.) He wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Duet. “It’s a very visceral piece,” Ochoa says of this installation. “I’m interested in activating the space, so people have to walk around it.” (That weekend, during the opening, curious people will weave in and out of the legs, a brave soul even giving one a tentative wiggle.)
Ochoa is known for his use of industrial materials, including galvanized fence posts, chicken wire, concrete, and dirt, assembled into graceful forms that, as McGrath notes, suggest “the gleeful liberation of a construction yard.” For this show, McGrath paired Ochoa with St. Louis artist B.j. Vogt, who works with similar materials, in this case narrow two-by-fours covered in a hardware store’s worth of paint drips—cream, dark blue, orange, yellow, pink, gray, brown—stuck together, drips facing wrong side up, run in a disorienting midwall border throughout the gallery. Vogt also used unpainted, raw lumber as the base for a sculpture made from a nearly deconstructed shopping cart, posed to give it a sense of great movement and energy—i.e., it was moving so fast the wheels were falling off. It sported a peeling coat of white paint that revealed the red plastic underneath and gave it, as Vogt noted, a “bleached-bone, bottom-of-the-sea feel.”
McGrath, along with partner Dana Turkovic, masterminded Isolation Room/Gallery Kit, a one-room apartment gallery that exhibited one work at a time. Asked how that project is going, McGrath laughs. “It’s moved to Copenhagen,” he explains. His focus in the immediate term, he says, is on Duet, which is underwritten by philanthropists and art collectors Ken and Nancy Kranzberg. McGrath says at first, the Kranzbergs contemplated using the space to show their collection of St. Louis artists. They really liked the idea of pairing a St. Louis artist with one from somewhere else, however, which accomplishes two things: exposing audiences and artists to work they may not see otherwise, and helping St. Louis artists make connections to get their work seen in other cities. And in Grand Center, the gallery’s size, as well as its mission, make it unique.
“One thing we have in the future is a curator in from London who’s going to be bringing artists in,” says McGrath. Duet will also program related films, readings, and other events to bring visitors in throughout the exhibit’s run. McGrath says he hopes to open it up to nonprogrammed events, too. For instance, a few weeks after the November opening, a group of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville students in an ekphrastic writing class sat in the gallery, composing poems about the sculptures. Though the gallery’s name and most basic mission suggest an image of two artists talking, the goal is to expand that simple conversation into a noisy, productive, crowd-size one.
“This space can become an area for different groups to meet,” says McGrath. “I really just want the space to be actively used.”
“Ruben Ochoa and B.j. Vogt” runs through February 15. Duet is located at 3526 Washington, Ste. 300. For more information, go to duetstl.com.
